The proverb "Slow and steady wins the race" echoes through my mind as every day passes. I can feel myself in the lull of my life. I feel extremely calm and collected even when there are a ton of things racing through my mind or even in my life. I can consider myself lucky to be in this place of peace and happiness but at the same time, I know I need to remind myself that I need to keep taking a step forward every single day otherwise I will not go far in life. I have goals that I know cannot be achieved in one day. "Slow and steady wins the race."

Running

At the beginning of the year, I started running. You can see that I've mostly talked about running in my blog thus far and have 5 posts before this about running. Hopefully it shows some progress! (I think it does). I put it to myself to make sure I ran and live a healthier life style. Unfortunately, I don't eat as healthy as I used to, but I try to still be mindful to get my fruits and vegetables! But that's another story. I wanted to focus on exercising regularly.

The year is almost over and I'm fairly proud of how much I've exercised. It isn't the greatest, I assumed by this time I would be exercising 3+ times a week, but I'm still going only 2-3 times a week. But I wanted to quickly review what I've achieved:

• I've brought down my mile time from 10-11 minutes to 8 minutes! Yes that's right, I can now run a mile in a little over 8 minutes. Generally at the 8:05-8:10 range! With my best time being 7:56! (Caveat: This is on a treadmill, but I think it's still worthy of some pride!)
• I can run 3 miles at 6mph fairly consistently now without trouble! I'm excited because 1 mile used to be daunting and now 3 miles is just ... BORING! :P Yes, I said it with a hint of "this is easy" and "I'm getting hella bored."

I'm very excited for the new year. Although I don't usually make New Year's Resolutions anymore, I know for 2015, I will have the following resolution set in stone.

Run a 10K before 2016 and actually finish it!

I know, it may seem easy to many of you, but 6 miles seems daunting to me still even if 3 miles is boring. I know at the end of 3 miles, I am still fairly tired, but I think the biggest issue is that I get bored at around 2 miles. I may need to find some good music to listen to during the runs. A 10K will take me an hour to complete and for an hour, I'm definitely going to need something to distract me!

If you have any tips on running for such a long distance and not getting bored, I'd love to hear about them because seriously, I'll need them!

Development

I feel like I've hit a wall in my professional development. Work has been great and I am learning a lot but I think I am missing the aspect of learning new technologies and experimenting with new things. The past month, I've been working on a performance issue that is currently a stumper. I hope to write about it later, but for now, I will just say that I am learning more about more about the kernel and the workings of the operating systems from a "real world" perspective rather than from the academic side of implementing running queues.

It's challenging and exciting but at the same time, I can feel my development skills at a complete stop. This needs to change. I will need to keep in mind that this won't change in the next 24 hours but I should work toward a brighter future every single day. I have been trying to work into my schedule time to read, work on random problems from math problems to programming problems, to learning something new.

Conclusion

I've been motivated a lot recently but can easily find myself stressed or tired that I prevent myself from trying to improve every day. I think if I can slowly make progress, I will eventually start moving at a faster pace, just like with my running. Just have to remember "Slow and steady wins the race."

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